Do You Remember?: 9/11 was the day that changed the world. There were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by the militant Islamic extremist network al-Qaeda against the United States as many of us watched in horror. In the short term, the terrorists succeeded in terrorizing the world. In the long term, it changed the world for the worse, and we’ll be living with the consequences for generations to come.
Here is a compilation of photos from that day worth remembering.
https://www.history.com/news/september-11-attacks-photos
Restore Americans’ Faith in Elections: The Federalist has a great article that describes how easy it would be to restore Americans’ faith in elections. Just fix the sloppy record-keeping…and in most cases, it’s the law!
Take the time to read the article below. This is probably more indicative of why so many don’t trust election results. The cases of “provable” voter fraud are minimal, so why not fix the easy stuff? It’s important to understand the facts…and the perception.
The goal is to make it easy to vote but hard to cheat…voter ID and good record keeping would solve 99% of the problem.
Newt Gingrich: “Democrats own inflation. They own high gas prices. They own rising violent crime. They own the border disaster. They own the 87,000 new IRS agents. They own all of it. If Republicans stay focused on these issues, the Democrats will crumble.“
The liberal, progressive Democrats are having a hard time running on their issues, so they are trying to make Trump the issue. Someone has to let them know that he’s NO longer the President and a campaign based on demonizing former President Trump isn’t going to work. Just ask Governor Glenn Youngkin!
Crime is up.
Prices are up.
Kids are falling behind in school.
Maybe Joe Biden should spend less time attacking Republicans and more time solving the problems facing all Americans.
The liberals are trying to deflect and mislead voters. Focus on the issues that matter!
Student Loans: It’s just NOT fair to force people who didn’t go to college, who paid for college, or who paid off their student loans to have to pay taxes to pay off the student loans of other people.
Only the crazy progressive liberal Democrats trying to “buy” votes with your money hope to get away with this. Their philosophy is simple, if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can normally count on Paul’s support.
Irony: Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Media, Big Tech, Hollywood, and somehow Republicans are a threat to democracy?!?
The progressive left’s woke/cancel culture IS the threat to our great republic and the American way of life. Voting matters.
Michigan – Tudor Dixon: She’s accomplished, sharp, articulate, a mom, and a tireless worker. Tudor Dixon is a very strong candidate and will make a GREAT Governor of Michigan!
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
WEEKLY NEWS VIDEO: The GOP has a shrinking donor pool problem, Biden has been on vacation for over 200 days during his administration, and who is Ultra-MAGA?
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/08/gop-shrinking-donor-pool-midterms-00055317
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/struggles-to-define-maga
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Biden just painted a soul-crushing vision of America that does not reflect the country I know and love
President Biden offered a playbook of division in his anti-MAGA speech and a vision of American that is utterly disconnected from reality.
On Thursday night in Philadelphia, Joe Biden used his presidential perch, flanked by two United States Marines, to give one of the most menacing and divisive campaign speeches in recent memory.
In his soul-crushing “soul of the nation” speech, the president threw half the country back into Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables. Anyone who refuses to go along with his radical agenda that’s bankrupting the country is a threat. Anyone who stands up for religious liberty is an extremist. Anyone who is a voice for voiceless and vulnerable unborn babies is a danger to democracy.
That’s the picture Biden painted of America. But his illustration of our country and her people couldn’t be more disconnected from reality. The truth is this speech was a feeble attempt to distract American voters from Democrats’ abysmal record heading into the midterms.
President Biden and Democrats across the country are hoping they can get voters to believe what they say, rather than what they can see with their own two eyes.
You see, according to him migrants aren’t illegally flooding into our country every day. Never mind the fact that we see small town mayors and border patrol agents struggling to deal with the influx from record illegal crossings.
Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward
iden’s Democrats seek a one-party state. Trump’s followers want freedom from government power.
The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong.
Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”
As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They are Norman Rockwellians, or Eisenhowerites. They regard themselves, not without reason, as the last sane Americans. You might think of them as American masculinity in exile; like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, living in the forest has made their manners rough.
If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.
Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.
Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies—and finally Mr. Biden—to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode.
Gingrich Says ‘Media Refuses to See Red Wave Coming’
“Democrats own inflation. They own high gas prices. They own rising violent crime. They own the border disaster. They own the 87,000 new IRS agents. They own all of it. If Republicans stay focused on these issues, the Democrats will crumble.”
The legacy, left-wing media is at best misunderstanding – and at worst deliberately distorting – the evidence that a Republican-led wave election is coming in November.
This is especially true in the U.S. Senate, where Republican candidates are well positioned to regain control of the body in a mass repudiation of President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ policies.
For starters, it’s a midterm in a new president’s term. History tells us these elections almost always cut against the president’s party. Add to this that 74 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction thanks to out-of-control spending, 40-year high inflation, rising prices, surging violence, an unpoliced border, and a host of lesser crises.
The Democrat-led Congress has a 79 percent disapproval rating, according to Statista. And Biden is hovering at 53 percent disapproval in an average of polls of likely voters, according to FiveThirtyEight (many polls are much worse for Biden)
But set these broad indicators aside for a moment.
The left-wing media is currently pointing to the recent special election in New York’s 19th Congressional District as a bellwether for the November elections. Democrat Pat Ryan eked out a 2-percentage-point win over Republican Marc Molinaro. To claim this Democrat victory as a sign of things to come is either ignorant or dishonest. New York’s 19th District is reliably blue. In 2020, the Democrat won by 11.6 percentage points.
To Restore Americans’ Faith In Elections, Fix Sloppy Record-Keeping
If we can enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1960’s data retention requirements, we will be able to help restore confidence in our elections.
nfortunately, election officials across the country are not keeping the most basic data to monitor election outcomes. Even when they say they do, the numbers do not come close to matching up.
It was a simple goal: match the number of voters with the number of ballots cast. After the last general election there were concerns that ballots were counted multiple times (so that there could be more ballots cast than voters who voted) and that ballots were destroyed (so that there could be more voters who voted than ballots cast). But, through our examination, we learned that it cannot be determined if these discrepancies exist, because most states and counties simply do not keep timestamped records of who voted as required by law.
The America First Policy Institute made public records requests based on state-specific laws for the top 100 most-populated counties in the traditional 14 swing states that typically determine presidential elections. Ninety-four of the 100 counties did not keep records of who voted in the 2020 election, and only two state-wide election officers had the records preserved. Equally disturbing, even in the six counties that did keep records, there was on average a 2.89 percent discrepancy between the number of people voting and the number of ballots cast.
In Miami-Dade, Florida, the discrepancy was about 1.6 percent — a difference of 16,617 votes. Ninety-two percent of the precincts had more recorded ballots cast than voters (for a total of 15,854), and the other 8 percent had more voters than ballots cast (763). Since 12 percent of precincts were missing records, we didn’t include those. That’s a discrepancy that can very well swing elections. For example, in 2018, Republican Rick Scott won Florida’s U.S. Senate seat by 10,033 votes.
Cobb County, Georgia, had a massive discrepancy of 34,893 votes, or 8.8 percent. All but one of the precincts had more ballots cast than voters. The gap was more than two and half times the 13,471 votes Republican David Perdue fell short of winning in Georgia’s first round Senate race in November 2020. Sen. Jon Ossoff then won the run-off the following January.
Federal Government’s Bungled Census Bad News for Red States. Here’s Why.
If a politician from Florida decides to run for president in 2024, his (or her) home state will be short two votes in the Electoral College, and when the new session of the U.S. House of Representatives convenes in January 2023, Florida will be missing two congressional seats to which it is entitled.
Why? Because according to a post-2020 census survey, the U.S. Census Bureau significantly undercounted the population of Florida, as well as Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. At the same time, it overcounted the population of eight states, all but one of which is a blue state.
The 2020 errors were discovered when the Census Bureau interviewed a large number of households across the country and compared the answers it got to the original census responses in 2020. In addition to undercounting six states, the survey showed that the Bureau overcounted the population of Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Utah.
Funny coincidence—the Census made its largest overcount percentage error in President Joe Biden’s tiny home state of Delaware, which was overcounted by 5.45%. But Rhode Island and Minnesota were also overcounted by 5.05% and 3.84%, respectively, which allowed each of them to keep a congressional seat to which they are not entitled.
Minnesota, according to the original census report, would have lost a congressional seat during reapportionment if it had 26 fewer residents; the survey shows the state was overcounted by 216,971 individuals. Similarly, Rhode Island would have lost a seat if the Census Bureau had counted 19,000 fewer residents. It turns out that the state was overcounted by more than 55,000 individuals.
So both states will continue to have more representation in Congress, and more votes in the Electoral College, than they should. The same is true of Colorado, which was awarded a new congressional seat that it should not have gotten.
Contrast that with Texas, which the Census Bureau survey says was undercounted by almost 2%. That represents over a half a million Texans, which means that, like Florida, Texas was cheated out of an additional member of Congress. At that time, the Census Bureau said that Texas needed only 189,000 more people to gain another congressional seat. Turns out Texas already had them.
Arkansas had the largest percentage undercount at 5.04%, which represented over 150,000 residents of the state.
These errors by the Census Bureau also mean that the overcounted states will be receiving a larger share of the over $1.5 trillion in federal funds that are distributed to the states over the next decade based on their states’ populations. And the undercounted states? They will be getting less funding than they should.
Fed on Path for Another 0.75-Point Interest-Rate Lift After Powell’s Inflation Pledge
Fed officials face questions over how high to lift rates by year’s end and how fast to get there
The Federal Reserve appears to be on a path to raise interest rates by another 0.75 percentage point this month in the wake of Chairman Jerome Powell’s public pledge to reduce inflation even if it increases unemployment.
Fed officials have done little to push back against market expectations of a third consecutive 0.75-point rate rise in recent public statements and interviews ahead of their Sept. 20-21 policy meeting.
Investors in interest-rate futures markets saw a roughly 75% probability on Wednesday that the Fed will raise rates by another 0.75 point this month, according to CME Group.
Major U.S. stock indexes closed higher Wednesday, with the Nasdaq Composite ending a seven-session streak of declines. Oil prices fell to their lowest level since before the invasion of Ukraine. Treasury yields also declined, with the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield closing at 3.264%, from 3.339% on Tuesday.
In a speech Aug. 26 in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Mr. Powell underscored the central bank’s commitment to boosting interest rates enough to lower inflation from 40-year highs. “We will keep at it until we are confident the job is done,” he said.
NRA: Over 1 million use firearms to protect themselves yearly
The National Rifle Association is pushing back on critics of expanded concealed carry freedoms with a new and emotional twist on its “good guy with a gun” pitch first made after the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Noting the media’s general refusal to report when legally held guns are used to repel attackers, the NRA said today that it occurs over 1 million times a year.
But, the Virginia-based Second Amendment rights advocate said, the nation’s five largest newspapers offered just 10 stories in 2021 about legal gun owners defending themselves, families, and friends.
The group said those same papers ran 1,743 stories in which the words “murder,” “gunfire,” or “shots” were mentioned.
The new online campaign features the story of Phoenix-area NRA member Raul Mendez and how he broke up a mass shooting despite having his eye shot out and being left for dead. It’s a story he believes was not covered by major media because he succeeded in quickly recovering and killing the alleged assailant.
Taxes in Retirement: How All 50 States Tax Retirees
We rated every state, plus the District of Columbia, on how retirees are taxed. Some of the results might surprise you.
To move or not to move? That is the question for many retirees. If you want to be closer to your grandchildren, enjoy better weather or pay less for housing, moving to a different state may be the way to go. But retirees often overlook an important factor when deciding if, or where, they should relocate – state and local taxes.
Your overall state and local tax burden can vary widely from one place to another. The difference between taxes in one location versus another could be in the tens of thousands of dollars for some people. And, while most people tend to focus on income taxes, other taxes — like sales and property taxes — can add up quickly, too.
So, if you’re thinking of moving in retirement, where does your current state and your destination state fit it when it comes to taxes? We ranked all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, based on how they tax retirees. The results are below, along with an overview for each state of taxes that most affect retirees. Hopefully, the information below will help you determine if moving to a different state makes sense for your retirement budget.
Queen Elizabeth II: A life in pictures
Queen Elizabeth II lived her life in the spotlight. We look back at her reign, from baby to heir to Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.
